Saturday, November 27, 2010

Who needs COICA? Apparently not the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division. It has seized several domains, as many as 77 thus far. While many of the seized domains were online stores offering counterfeit goods, there were also a few websites involved with piracy, including a torrent search engine.

The torrent search engine, Torrent-Finder.com was a metasearch engine, which means it didn't host BitTorrent links itself. Metasearch engines send queries to one or many other search engines databases, then aggregates and displays the results. according to their source. By using iframes, Torrent-Finder.com didn't host copyrighted material, or even links to copyrighted material, but rather links to links to copyrighted material.

Torrent-Finder remains operational through a separate domain, Torrent-Finder.info. That is, of course, for now anyway.

All the sites seized display the following message (as shown above):

This domain name has been seized by ICE - Homeland Security Investigations, pursuant to a seizure warrant issued by a United States District Court under the authority of 18 U.S.C. 981 and 2323.

Willful copyright infringement is a federal crime that carries penalties for first time offenders of up to five years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, forfeiture and restitution (17 U.S.C 506, 18 U.S.C 2319). Intentionally and knowingly trafficking in counterfeit goods is a federal crime that carries penalties for first time offenders of up to ten years in federal prison, a $2,000,000 fine, forfeiture and restitution (18 U.S.C. 2320).

TorrentFreak, as linked above, hosts a full list of the domains seized recently.